The present invention relates to a self-service business system and more particularly relates to such a system having the capability of predicting the type of transaction which a particular customer is likely to initiate and of pre-conditioning the .apparatus on the basis of such prediction to expedite its operation in carrying out the transaction.
As the complexity and range of services made available by self-service systems such as automated teller machines (ATMs) increase, there is a desirability that the means by which a user interacts with these systems should be improved. Where the services provided by a self-service device are both large in number and varied in nature, it has been necessary to break these up into functional groups. It is known to provide a series of menu interfaces which allow a user to navigate through these groups, allowing the user to access the actual service which the user requires. Generally, the user must evaluate each of the options presented on a menu and select one of them, either to proceed to a lower level menu or to request a required service. The number of decisions and selections that a user must make increases as the range of facilities provided increases. This increasing workload for the user is known as cognitive load, and is likely to have an increasing impact in the future as regards the willingness of a user to use the full range of facilities offered by a self-service system.